No Good Deed

From my spare room window, I can see Helen in the garden next door. She has her back to me, her feet planted wide apart with ham hock hands on beefy hips. She’s finally got round to dragging the Christmas tree outside, which she’s hauled on top of the brown bones of its predecessors. She’s breathless now, gulping in the still, cold air. 

Her sixth sense must feel my eyes on her, so she turns and waves. My friend, Helen, the ugliest woman in town. Helen of Troy’s beauty was such that it provoked men to war. Her namesake, the Helen in the garden next door, has a face which looks like it’s launched a thousand ships, as though it’s been relentlessly flung against the gunwales like an unbreakable magnum of bon voyage champagne dangling on a rope. 

Still, she does considerably better with the men than I do. All a matter of confidence, ultimately. When it comes to men, I am a mess of doubts. Do I really want to get mixed up again? Is he really a stock broker? Helen, though, she just plucks someone off a barstool and takes them home, like a bear with a cub. They don’t stick around, but I get the feeling Helen doesn’t need them to. 

She makes a hand gesture at me. Not a cup of tea gesture, which is a little finger in the air and a nuanced dip of the hand, but a wavering hand gesture, like a palsy, which suggests something stronger. It’s 3pm, as good a time as any, so after I brush my hair, I take a walk up her path. 

For all the impression I’ve just given of Helen, I worry about her. A lot. She has no hinterland or curiosity but lives entirely for the moment. This can make conversations difficult because you can’t allude to anything with Helen. She simply won’t understand what you’re talking about. This is all tolerable, if a bit limiting, but riding pillion with this outlook on life is a paranoia, all consuming, about being, or feeling, forgotten. It is a contradiction I’ve tried to explain to her in the past, this desire to live entirely in the present whilst longing for a permanent legacy for herself, but she just doesn’t get my argument. She’s being a hypocrite, I’ve argued, demanding something of her time on earth which she denies to everyone else. Too abstract? For Helen, yes. 

It has a name, this fear of being forgotten. Athazagoraphobia. For obvious reasons, I won’t be repeating it. It doesn’t slip off the tongue quite as neatly as Helen’s single malt slips down my throat. 

Her kitchen’s neat and warm. In the centre of the table is her laptop, currently open on Facebook, but there are other tabs open too. Social sites I’ve probably never heard of, where she constantly updates people on her activities. She spends an hour a day, minimum, sending Happy Birthday messages to people she barely knows. Collectively, she spends more time again on anniversaries, celebrations and commiserations. The only reason she leaves this cocoon of interconnectivity is to go to work, go shopping, or go socialising - where she meets other people she can press her cards on. 

Who does this? An air kiss and a business card, except it’s a calling card with her name, address and email on it. More red letter days to collate and, (more importantly), new people to wish her a happy birthday. Helen has already got her memorial page planned out, blithely assumes that her funeral will be paid for by crowdfunding, and that her image will remain in perpetuity. She has no concerns at all about dangerous people and the information she freely gives them. 

Times are that I worry about myself too. I worry about why I’m worrying about Helen. She’s not hurting anyone, although she did once say to me, with the hint of a missed opportunity, that only serial killers were regularly remembered these days. I told her it wasn’t true: that the heyday of serial killers was in the seventies and eighties. DNA has stripped the guesswork out of it, and more to the point, people have become inured to it. They’re still out there, but their names are forgotten. It comes to something when a phobia leads to a grudging regard for Ted Bundy. 

*****

The months push on like a fast-moving queue and it feels like only a moment has passed before Helen’s garden is showing burgeoning flower heads and that ingenue shade of green only the spring can procure. I want to get away for a couple of nights, now that the season is more conducive. Helen and I have journeyed together before and we get along really well, so long as I ignore the flirtatious glances and her fondness for the spa facilities as opposed to the museums and the art galleries. 

I don’t recall any short trip away with Helen where she didn’t pull a man, and I will say it again, I don’t get it. Yes, she has two eyes, a nose and mouth, but she is definitely Picasso’s muse and not Vermeer’s. My brother tells me it’s because she’s easy. A lot of men, he explained, will take the path of least resistance. Just for one night. It doesn’t bother me. It’s just one of the endless things I am curious about. 

We never share a twin room when we go away, although it would be cheaper. My insistence on this is for shamefully shallow reasons, but in the interests of full-disclosure, I will admit that, whilst I have zero problem with anyone thinking I’m gay, I don’t want anyone to think I’m being gay with Helen. 

She agreed to come with me to Kent on the east coast of England. I had something specific in mind, something that I thought might cure her phobia, like an ice-bath for the mind. I promised that she would have her own room, and use of the spa facilities in a four star hotel just a pebble’s toss from the beach. Half-board, decent pubs, Men of Kent (presumably) and a fresh crop of people who would be forever obliged to remember her. I just needed her to do one thing for me. She didn’t take much persuading. 

*****

I’ll bypass the minutia of travel and all sundry descriptives, and cut to the plot, such as it is. The plot, in this case, is the graveyard at St Leonard’s church in Hythe. As we picked our way through the tussocks, with Helen complaining about the presence of history in general, my perfidious mind thought what an incongruous name Leonard was for a saint. 

We stopped at the newest gravestones, those less rococo reminders, set flat and square in the grass. Most, but not all, had flowers and mementos on them. ‘These people are remembered,’ I said. ‘They’ve died within living memory. Some just a few months ago.’

‘Yep,’ said Helen, looking at her watch. 

‘Who will remember you when you’re gone?’ I asked. She looked exasperated, and I could see why. My point was too nascent. 

‘Is this about me not having any children?’ she asked, with resentment clearly inflected.

‘No,’ I said, and it genuinely wasn’t. Helen still had time, if that’s what she wanted. ‘I’m trying to explain this.’ I took her by the elbow and showed her a much older grave, an upright stone, leaning with age. I waved my hand at the rest. ‘These people,’ I said, ‘are forgotten. They have gone from living memory. However hard they might have strived in life, there are no flowers on their graves now.’ 

She still wasn’t getting it. 

‘You waste your life, Helen, desperately trying to be remembered. To not be forgotten. And yet we are all forgotten in the end … unless you’re Julius Caesar or Ghengis Khan. Maybe Elvis. And even if you were remembered, for some reason or other, how would you know? How could you possibly know?’ 

‘I waste my life?’ she said. ‘I waste my life? Tell me what’s so different between you and me?’ she snapped. ‘We live next door to each other, with identical floor plans and identical gardens. Except my garden has flowers in it. Yours doesn’t. I get laid. You don’t. You earn precisely fifty quid a month more than I do. Beyond that, tell me what’s so different about us?’

‘Because it’s sad,’ I said. ‘It’s just sad.’ And I was going to go further and say desperate, but whoever St Leonard was, he at least granted me the wisdom to leave it unsaid. 

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, as I led her somewhere else. 

‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘You have a spider phobia. We’ve all got our thing. My phobia, as you call it, doesn’t make me scream like a fifth-former. Leave it be. I’m happy enough.’ 

I didn’t want to tell Helen that my worst fear was that other people thought she was a nuisance. In fact, I knew that plenty did. Running from a spider was small-fry compared to the creeping horror people felt when they realised they had forgotten Helen’s birthday or had failed to send an e-card over Christmas. 

We entered a building with large, ecclesiastical windows. At this time of day, with the May sun high, it was no less dark than outside. I had been here before when I was a child. It was an ossuary, a charnel house, with fibulas and tibias and pretty skulls all in a row. Most old churches have them hidden away, waiting to be found. The bones of medieval people who had been removed to make way for new incumbents, still held within the sacristy of parish boundaries. Still within God’s grace, although their hips bones no longer connected to their thigh bones.

Helen was speechless, whether in shock or epiphany, I had no idea. She read the information board and walked carefully, almost reverently, amongst the neat piles of bone. Skulls, interspersed, varied wildly. Some had high cheekbones whereas others were courser, almost neanderthal in form. Teeth were missing, fallen out over the years, giving the effect of an abandoned game of cribbage. Some had craters in them, evidence of trepanning. 

‘You see,’ I whispered. ‘These people are entirely forgotten. Not even an epitaph. It doesn’t mean they didn’t live useful lives. You can’t demand to be remembered, Helen.’ 

She wasn’t listening. Her eyes had fixated on the one thing I’d forgotten from my childhood visit. The varnished skull, the one yellow, shiny skull in a sea of bleached bone, like cuttlefish on the shore. The one that stood out. The one I now remembered. The skull that had been stolen in the 1960s by a schoolboy and varnished to make it gleam. The one that was returned after his death by shamefaced relatives, like a long-lost library book. I didn’t tell Helen that. She was ably assisted by a church volunteer, who clearly had not tired of telling the story. 

And then the worse thing this innocent pensioner could have said to a person like Helen. The mention of European ossuaries, particularly in the Alps where space is scarce. How parishioners were buried in vertical pits and dug up after a prescribed period of time to make way for others. How their skulls were painted and memorialised like tombstones, with names, dates, and depictions of alpine flowers. Wir lieben dich, mutter. Then varnished. ‘You should visit Hallstatt,’ he said, patting Helen’s arm with a pamphlet. ‘It’s in Austria. I think you’ll like it. No one’s forgotten there.’

*****

In the dog days of summer, Helen and I went to Austria. We did the whole Sound of Music thing, and the Mozart thing, drank too much schnapps, and I believe that Helen worked her way through a few competent horn blowers, although we don’t really talk about that. I have never seen her so happy then in the ossuary on the shores of Hallstatt lake. 

*****

When winter drew in again, she told me of her plans. She had decided to donate her body to medical research, but with a caveat. Her skull was to be touted, like a horse brass, amongst the various pubs of our home town until some enterprising landlord took it. Helen believes that the biker’s pub will jump at the chance - they already have an unclaimed set of false teeth behind the bar. When I told her that there were no guarantees about that, she stopped me short. 

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Like you say, I’ll be dead. But while I’m living, it makes me happy. I will have my dates on it, you see. So no one will ever forget —’

‘Your birthday,’ I said. 

*****

I think it’s fair to say that nothing has changed. Helen still has no hinterland, and she still hasn’t moved the ever growing pile of dead Christmas trees from her garden. But I suppose I’ve learned to let it go. If nothing else is true, I am still afraid of spiders, so who am I to judge? She didn’t learn anything from my amateur intervention. In fact, it made it all worse than ever. Worse, and with an ultimate plan. To be a grinning skull in a sticky bar. Yep. Top darts to me. 

I have changed, though. At first, I was furious at myself for bringing it to this. And then I thought that I would completely forget her birthday and see how that played out. But I couldn’t forget. She’s my friend and neighbour. A harmless fruitcake with a great taste in whisky. And I’ve realised that you can’t change people. You don't have the power.

Oscar Wilde was right when he said that no good deed goes unpunished.